Does anyone recall...........did he do that using Kelly Criterion mm or Optimal F mm? I have heard differing points of view on that?
The trick is to bet over 10% of the account per trade. These types of returns are then not hard to achieve assuming you get lucky in the first few months and dont a hit a 50% drawdown before you double your account a few times. A big drawdown (over 50%) before you double your account is fatal as its harder to do consistent money management on very small accounts. If the intial account value was 50K then a 50% initial drawdown would not be so much of a problem. There were three seperate 50% drawdowns during that 12 month period but they all occured after the account was up 8000% percent. One other point, assuming i did get lucky and hit an intial winning streak, i dont think i could replicate this feat today in my IB trading account, as the margin requirements would stop me from owning enough contracts. I would need a broker that had $500 per mini contract margin requirements to do it.
i don't understand how come his stop loss is sooooo deep? doesn't he claim he knows how to cut loss / money managing well?
do you have a text version of his trades? i want to run them into an excel file to see what kind of per contract stop he is using. also, do you know larry williams' official website? there are too many sites selling his courses.
Re. the deep stop loss, etc... One thing to remember about this performance is that it was for a CONTEST. It is certainly a remarkable achievement, whatever else can be said, but this is neither typical of Larry Williams' performance, nor anyone else's. This is NOT how Larry Williams trades his own "real" money. If I am in a trading contest, and looking to build business, whether for a CTA or selling my seminars and books or whatever, I will take HUGE risks compared to what I might do otherwise. No one will ever hear about me blowing out a small $10,000 contest account in a week (or a day), but if I am both very good and VERY lucky, overtrade like hell, and all the stars align just right, I might be forever famous for turning $10K into a million, even if I never come close to doing it again. (Which would be a GOOD thing, as it would suggest a more normal risk/reward profile). Keep in mind that there were multiple 50% drawdowns in the account, and it was more luck than anything that they happened as late as they did, AFTER a large runup, or Larry would have lost $10K in "fun money" and we would simply never have heard anything about the contest. Jessie
A bit of reading material for you: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=1007920#post1007920
hmm..that's what i thought i read but couldnt recall the details...to be fair if he was such a great trader why did he bump into a multimillion dollar losses in one acct and made an apparent fortune outta nothing in another that for all intent and purpose was not segregated...i think this affair is very very suspicious and point out at the obvious.
Bitstream, you can not be this fucking moron, I just can't believe it! In the Larry thread we dealt with it, I even quoted him, read it again. Thundy simply can't deal with the evidence. There was no mixing of the accounts. His daughter a few years later repeated his feat. Sure if you use the right strategy in the right time ( we could call it luck) you can make big money. Read my Journal, one of the most profitable reads in ET. Why? Because I was mostly long in a uptrend... Can I repeat it? Sure, if I pick the right time and use the same strategy... P.S. If somebody has been long overleveraged in the last 6 months, he would be up like 1000% easily...